I did this for English camp and it was a big hit, so I thought I'd share.


1. Use the Intro Vocab PPT to explain what a Spelling Bee is. (Most of my CTs had never even heard of this, so you might want to brief them beforehand.)

2. Watch the "Akeelah and the Bee" clip to demonstrate a Spelling Bee. Korean subtitles included!

3. Have your own Spelling Bee

• Divide Ss into groups of 6 or less.
• Explain how the Spelling Bee will work using the Instructions PPT.
• Pass out the Spelling Bee Practice worksheet and give Ss 5 minutes to look over it and study. All the words in the Spelling Bee are on this page.
• Give each group 10 hearts. (I printed mine on pink paper to make it more fun.)
• Place chairs at the front of the classroom (according to the number of teams), and call up one student from each group to sit.
• Using the Spelling Bee Instructions PPT, ask the student from team 1 to spell the first word (team 2 student - second word, team 3 student - third word, etc). Each student should have a new word to spell.
• If they spell the word wrong or look at the monitor behind them, take a heart from that team.
• After the first student from each group has finished spelling their word, call up the second round of students.
• The team with the most hearts at the end is the winner.

Note:

• I gave my kids those fake plastic microphones that make your voice echo and they loved it!
• I allowed my students to ask for a hint, and would give them the Korean definition of the word and/or the first letter. They could also say "pass" and forfeit a heart if they couldn't spell it. I also cut them off after a minute if they didn't make an attempt to spell and took a heart.
• Doing teams is better than doing it individually, because students who cannot spell well get discouraged really quickly.
• My students are lower level, so I actually took out some of the hardest words from the Spelling Bee PPT (program, business, etc), but left it on the worksheet. Feel free to add them in again if your students can handle it.
• Having the word visible on the screen behind the spellers was good because the Ss who were not spelling could see and follow along with what was happening, but it also encouraged some students to try and cheat and whisper the answer to their teammates. So choose what you want to do.

This was a great activity to do with elementary school kids.

Surprisingly they were very engaged with the movie (which is very rare) and even moaned when the clip finished!

Thanks for this activity. I adapted it for my middle schoolers and it worked a treat.

I cant wait to do this for my class!!

    This is a great idea! I used it to review vocabulary we learned last week. Worked quite well. Thanks much!

      Not to nit-pick, but many of us use projectors, and they often create visibility issues, as ambient light often makes images hard to see. Similarly, if you're lucky enough to have a classroom television, kids at the back of the class can often have difficulty seeing.
    Occasionally this leads to some visibility issues so I thought I'd bore all of you with some unasked for advice regarding text in a ppt:

  - Don't use any font size smaller than 48. If you find that that's too big... then you have way too much writing for a single slide. I try to keep it to no more than 4 short sentences per slide.
  - Use high contrast fonts: use white letters on a black background or black on a white one. Alternatively, use white lettering outlined with black. This makes the letters visible regardless of background.
  - If possible, have text appear only one sentence at a time. It's easier to digest than the dreaded wall-of-words.
  - Not all fonts are created equally: the kerning on Comic Sans is quite good, as it is very simple, presents letters as they should be hand printed (without any loops on "g"s, no tails on "t"s, wierdness on "a"s etc), is well spaced, and makes nerds angry.